Anti-Arab Racism
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While major mainstream media outlets in the US have begun to show dangerous signs of doing actual journalism reporting on Israel’s crimes—take this Washington Post investigation confirming no Hamas military involvement in the hospitals Israel bombed, or this New York Times investigation into Israel’s deliberate mass murder of fleeing Palestinians in designated “safe zones”, or this CNN analysis of the 2000-pound bombs Israel has dropped on civilians —Australia’s media and political class remains firmly entrenched in its Zionist outlook, and once again stands out on the world stage as one of the most racist on this Earth. I’m going to write a bit about that now, but before I do, I want to make a note that 2 million people are still being starved to death and systematically murdered; 27,000 Palestinians, and over 10,000 children have been murdered by Israel in a brazen, grotesque genocide that is being gleefully filmed by Israeli soldiers. Take, for example, this footage of Palestinians stripped to their underwear and herded into an empty stadium. This was not leaked, but rather posted by an Israeli soldier, complete with a jaunty, happy soundtrack.
We can’t lose sight of this, ever: in addition to the thousands of videos of Israeli atrocities shared by Palestinians, we also have thousands of videos from Israelis themselves proudly committing war crimes, laughing and joking as they do so. There is in fact a total uniformity in the visual narrative from oppressor and oppressed, though the emotions differ drastically—sadistic joy from the former to anguished grief from the latter. Where the picture becomes truly distorted is in the Zionist, anti-Arab, Islamophobic West and its disgracefully prejudiced reporting, some of which I’ve covered in previous posts.
Last week, Lebanese Australian journalist Antoinette Lattouf alongside Cam Wilson reported through Crikey that a viral video of a Palestinian-led protest at the Sydney Opera House was edited and the audio, seemingly showing a small group chant “gas the Jews”, could not be verified as authentic by expert audio analysts and police. This video, shared by the extremist group Australian Jewish Association, has been viewed millions of times, successfully smeared protest organisers, and lead to condemnation from various politicians, including the Prime Minister. Incidentally, the video was also captioned “Sydney, 2023 Muslim mob of 100s chant ‘Gas the Jews’”, which is Islamophobic and untrue. It was not a Muslim protest and while Muslims may have been present, their presence or lack thereof is irrelevant unless the suggestion is that Islam is to blame for the incitement of violence. Naturally, this has not been remarked upon.
In response to Lattouf’s carefully reported journalism, which has not been disproven in any way—but which did manage to embarrass most of the media and political class who ate up the original lie with the ease of veteran racists—the ABC fired Antoinette from her casual position as a morning radio host. The Australian, which described Lattouf as “the anti-Israel broadcaster”, an obviously defamatory claim I hope she sues them for, reports seeing the complaints sent through to the ABC.
This is extraordinary. The public broadcaster is apparently open to firing their employees based on the feelings of anybody who writes to them, and not on the merits of their reporting. Again, this is not Lattouf’s stance nor is it evidence of bias: she, alongside Cameron Wilson, reported the facts, which include expert evidence that the video had been edited, that the visuals did not match the audio, and that NSW Police had no unedited audio or visual evidence to back the veracity of the chants. While the extremist, racist group Australian Jewish Association initially claimed to have heard these things directly, to have filmed the footage, they have since distanced themselves from the scandal.
I’m not here to debate this particular case, to be clear. What is pertinent about it, though, which is symptomatic of a problem across our media, is the claim that Antoinette Lattouf is “pro-Palestinian” or “anti-Israel” and that this is such a bad thing in and of itself, she should be removed from her position. Everyone focuses on the few anti-Semitic chants—and the Crikey report, like the organisers of the protest, acknowledged there were some, and that those responsible were told to leave—but not on what the protest was about, which was the decision to light up a national symbol, the Sydney Opera House, in the colours of the Israeli flag. See, it’s perfectly okay to be “pro-Israeli”—to be “pro” the explicitly Jewish supremacist ethnostate—no matter their decades of war crimes, massacres and illegal actions, and still keep your job and not be judged as suspect. It’s perfectly okay to be anti-Arab in every sense of the word, and anti-Muslim too, the only problem is if you dare to criticise Israel and in doing so betray an unreasonable, unacceptable “pro-Palestinian” stance.
At the beginning of her interview with Dr Norman Finkelstein, Candace Owens refers to him as “pro-Palestinian” and Dr Finkelstein responded with: “I don’t want to quibble over terminology, but sometimes the terminology is wrong at the outset, it confuses things at the outset—I’m not ‘pro-Palestinian’, I’m not pro-Israeli, I am pro-truth and pro-justice.” Dr Finkelstein clearly understands how this rhetoric works to dismiss or undermine the speaker from the outset, but doesn’t speak about the fact that these terms, these ideological groupings, are in no way equal. You can be pro-Israeli, you can be a proud Zionist in fact—Zionism being an overtly racist, colonial ideology that is rooted in the dispossession and destruction of Palestinians—and appear on radio, and TV, and form lobby groups, and run for office, without issue. Indeed, US President “Genocide Joe” Biden openly declares himself to be Zionist too. There’s no consequence for this, no matter how depraved or atrocious or murderous the actions of Israeli Zionists are in achieving their aims.
As an example of this, you need look no further than another ABC episode, this time with Patricia Karvelas interviewing Deborah Conway, a Zionist singer who took to the stage at a concert wrapped in the Israeli flag. In the interview, which is replete with flagrant lies like the absurd claim that “there was peace, by and large, before Oct 7th”, the following exchange takes place:
Karvelas: “We know kids are not Hamas, right?”
Conway: “Well, it depends on what you call kids… You see young people, 16-17, toting rifles.”
Karvelas subsequently does not use the word “kids”, but switches to “young people”, despite the fact hundreds of babies have been murdered by Israelis, and over 40% of the 10,000 children murdered so far have been under the age of 15. The average age of the massacred so far is five. Is there any consequence for this gross distortion, this barbaric condoning of the murder of children? Of course not. After all, it only echoes the official Israeli line that “there are no innocents in Gaza”, or “that the children of Gaza brought this upon themselves.” Meanwhile, Antoinette Lattouf is deemed irredeemable for either, as The Australian suggests above, her factual reporting on a national news topic, or for reposting a Human Rights Watch report, which the ABC also reported, neither of which makes even the remotest sense or gives any sign of balance.
Every day Israeli politicians and public figures and citizens on social media openly declare the most hideous racist sentiments imaginable and not a word is said in Western media or by our politicians about it. This is not a problem specific to the ABC—although they have disgraceful form here, with ABC manager David Anderson earlier this year firing Palestinian journalist Fouad Abu Gosh for tweeting that there were parallels between Nazi treatment of Jews and Israeli treatment of Palestinians, a claim also made—at length, and for many years now—by Dr Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish man whose extended family were murdered in Auschwitz, and who is one of the foremost scholars in the world on the subject.
More broadly, we can look to reports like this one from The Islamophobia Register Australia which analysed the six most popular Australian news channels on social media and found a clear bias in the language and framing of stories shared over the course of a month (Oct 7 - Nov 7). “Significantly, five of the six outlets studied (The Australian, ABC News, 9 News, The Daily Telegraph and News. com.au) demonstrated an imbalance against Palestinians in their reporting, in at least one of the three categories that were studied.” The one exception from the six was The Daily Aus.
“The active voice was more likely to be used when discussing attacks on Israel by all five accounts. The passive voice was used more often to describe what was happening in Gaza than in Israel. The middle voice (a grammatical choice that exists outside the active or passive voice, and which denies even the possibility of an actor causing the event, but instead frames it as a natural, spontaneous occurrence) was never used for any posts about attacks on Israel, and was used by all five accounts when reporting on attacks on Gaza.”
These findings are consistent with other analyses of Anglosphere media, as in this report on The Column, looking at Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, which found a clear and distinct bias in reporting on Israeli casualties over Palestinian casualties.
In addition, both reports point to a clear and distinct bias in the language used to describe Palestinian victims (non-emotive) and the language used to describe Israeli victims (emotive). Per the Islamophobia report: "The Daily Telegraph used descriptive terms such as “gruesome”, “murdered”, “horrific”, “shock”, “massacre”, “atrocities”, “harrowing”, “graphic”, “terrified”, and “brutal” to describe the Oct 7 Hamas attacks on Israelis. It used no similarly emotive descriptive words to describe Israeli attacks on Palestinians.”
The situation in Australian media is so dire, so demonstrably warped toward favouring Zionists, that even signing an open letter calling for better journalistic standards in coverage of the conflict is seen as siding with Palestinians, often by senior editors who have been on all-expenses paid propaganda tours of Israel, being wined and dined in the apartheid state. Over 100 Australian journalists have been on these trips. This is not seen as affecting their impartiality at all. These editors, at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, have banned staff who signed this letter from reporting on the issue. Likewise, the ABC has also taken action against employees on this basis. Writing these sentences feels like an exercise in madness so blatant is this racism, but thankfully we have a clear example of the status quo sought by Zionists as articulated by former Israeli PM Yair Lapid: “If the international media is objective and shows both sides, it serves Hamas.”
In short, then, one needs to be pro-Israel at all times, in order to be acceptable to Zionists. They are no doubt thrilled with Australian media, then. Not only do they have journalists being fired from their jobs, or banned from reporting on the subject; and manipulative language that obfuscates their crimes and dramatises their losses, they also have people like Sharri Markson at Sky News railing about the “anti-Semitism” in the Australian arts because an artist shared a video that “describes the terrorists invading Israel as Palestinians making an escape from Gaza.” Where to even begin with this one line? Surely we can start with the most egregious lie: Hamas did not “invade” Israel. They did break out of the enforced siege of Gaza, and into the illegal Israeli settlements in Occupied Palestine. The description in question is not inaccurate. And yet trying to find even basic facts about this subject in the profoundly conservative Australian media is ridiculously rare. The only reason we even had a few mentions of Israel’s obligations under international human rights law as the occupying power, the fact that they do not have the right to use military force on a civilian population, is because the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories happened to visit the country and in so doing was able to provide actual pertinent facts to the Australian public.
Here we are almost three months into the daily slaughter of Palestinian civilians, a total of over 27,000 murdered people, and the majority of the discussion in Australian media has been about imagined or inflated perceptions of anti-Semitism. From the hysterical fantasy of a genocidal code in pro-Palestinian chants over the omitted, explicit calls for Palestinian genocide from Israeli figures actually carrying out an ongoing massacre; from a week of news about a hysterical accusation that wearing the kheffiyeh was anti-Semitic, the same week Palestinian Americans were shot for wearing theirs; from multiple artists losing their jobs or their representation based on their apparently “pro-Palestinian” actions, through to a Palestinian Australian man’s store being burned down; from the endless repetition of Israel’s framing that they are targeting Hamas, in direct contradiction of the evidence and the many claims they’ve made explicitly saying they are targeting everyone, through to the endless repetition of the racist lie and disgusting justification of murder that is “Hamas uses human shields”.
We’re not to talk about the repeated mass murders of civilians that Israel routinely carries out, the numerous times they’ve killed more than 1000 Palestinians over the years. We’re not to talk about the open calls for collective civilian punishment in the form of mass killing, illegal detainment, torture. We’re not to talk about the racist logic of “human shields”—militants existing alongside civilians—being equally and obviously applicable to Israel, which has mandatory military service, and military structures and targets in its cities. We’re not to talk about the obvious absurdity that the mass bombardment and shelling of civilians has nothing to do with Hamas, who we are told have bomb-proof tunnel structures which render the 29,000 bombs Israel has dropped an exercise in sadistic cruelty and the mass murder of children, the elderly, the disabled, and all civilians. We’re not to talk about the Israeli intelligence and military officials who admit that they target civilians, their “mass assassination factory”. At least, not without being accused of anti-Semitism.
Instead, every single day we talk about anti-Semitism while every single day I see videos of Palestinians being murdered. Yesterday I watched a Palestinian child bleed to death in his mother’s arms, from a shrapnel wound in his throat provided by Israeli-Jewish supremacists. Israeli-Jewish soldiers and politicians write gleeful messages on the sides of bombs they send to murder Palestinian civilians. And still you want to talk to me about anti-Semitism; this is the Zionist playbook in a nutshell, but that it works at all reflects how profoundly anti-Arab and anti-Muslim the West continues to be. Israeli-Jewish soldiers razed the Star of David into Gaza, erected giant menorahs, bombed and desecrated mosques, playing Hebrew prayers through mosque loudspeakers, in short doing everything possible to announce their Jewishness, to utilise identifiable Jewish symbols. They go to great lengths to remind us that this is the one and only Jewish State, and also to never talk about it as Jewish, because to do so is anti-Semitic.
In one way at least, we ought to be grateful to them for these crude, crass, ugly desecrations of Judaism, these blatant shows that demonstrate the emptiness in their spirits, their craven hearts. Nobody serious can mistake these people for having any faith whatsoever. These are the sad, pathetic actions of serial killers that bear resemblance only to other sadistic serial killers like Daesh, wielding the cloth and aesthetic of a culture and faith they have warped into a monstrous mirror that shows only themselves. And still, this tactic is disturbingly effective, such that Zionists can get away with saying things like “they hate us because we’re Jews” without being challenged by our media.
The reality is stark: there is nowhere in the West in which Jews are as at risk of persecution as Arabs and Arab Muslims. There is especially no sphere in which Jews, Israeli or otherwise, are as at risk of persecution as Palestinians of any age or faith. As the daily videos of genocide mount (again, released proudly by Israelis and despairingly by Palestinians) showing us the mass detainment and sexual abuse of Palestinians, the killing fields, the mass graves, the streets full of corpses, the endless bodies of children and babies, the hysterical claims of privileged Jews in the West like Amy Schumer, Debra Messing, Eve Barlow, and Stephen Fry, who laughably said “anti-Semitism is the only acceptable form of racism” are getting louder and louder. I call it hysterical, but that is perhaps too generous; white supremacists love nothing more than to invert the real, to present themselves as threatened by the barbarian subaltern, and to register this threat as the pretext for their violence.
I cannot begin to tell you the level of despair I feel having to watch Arabs slaughtered every day. I cannot begin to tell you the level of despair I feel watching as Palestinians and Arabs and allies reach for a new comparison every day—an historical horror, a canonically accepted monstrosity like Vietnam or, increasingly, the Holocaust itself—in the hope it will illustrate that this a massacre worth stopping, or at least worth caring about, and failing each time in the face of an entrenched anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment that has been cemented into Western society, a legacy of the War on Terror and centuries of Orientalism. Not only have we failed to move the indifferent Western media and political class, we have been met with an active hostility for even trying; when the attempt is not smeared, it is dismissed with the most cynical lies imaginable. You’re not helping; you’re not achieving anything; this has nothing to do with us;You don’t really care about Palestinians, you just hate Jews—because of course, to a Zionist, nobody can love Palestinians. I cannot begin to tell you the level of despair I feel watching Palestinians and others give way, over and over, to anti-Zionist Jews and Israelis, promoting and platforming them in the hope the message will finally get through and the killing stop, the apartheid stop, and failing continually.
This is not a criticism: I have done all of the above, too. I’ve made the comparisons. I’ve tried to find a way to get through. I have been doing this all my life, through the War on Terror, and the hundreds of thousands of bombs, the endless catastrophes wielded by the West against Arabs, Afghans, and Africans. I honestly think things have only gotten worse. I don’t know how to proceed in a world and society that accepts the murder of 1,000 Palestinian children a week without putting a stop it; a mass murder that we see photos and videos of every single day, making it unlike any other mass murder, of which there are many in the world. I want to stress, as well, that when I say we are failing to move the murderous militant West, I am not saying give up, I am not saying there is no point, far from it. This work, this labour, like art, does not lend itself to immediate tangible results, it is and will continue to manifest across generations. I firmly believe change is occurring, it is moving through us, we are giving it voice, we are giving it form, and we must keep going until it arrives—until Palestine is free.
Salaam,
Omar